The Original IBM PC

SO, I got home yesterday, and on my porch was a box that contained some smaller boxes.

SO I carefully unpacked it on my workbench, and this is what I pried out of the boxes:

Most people will look at my old IBM PC 5150 and say "Why did you buy that piece of junk?"

The Original IBM PC was a groundbreaking and historical computer, which launched a revolution in personal computers. Though I'll likely not be using it for playing DOOM or surfing the web, it sure will be like a 1963 Ford Mustang in an auto collection. There were millions of them made, and many are still on the road and in automotive museums. The PC is special, because like the Apple 2, it was an affordable computer that millions of Americans bought, and for which tens of thousands of programs were made. It had an enormous long life, and spawned hundreds of "clone" PC parts vendors.

Purchased on Ebay for $117, this pristine, clean unit came with the original manuals and discs, and the extremely heavy, but still glorious Model F keyboard.

The keyboard weighs about 10 pounds -- it feels like it's all metal. Since my first PC Clone had a plastic el cheapo keyboard, I never really had a chance to pick up and feel the weight of this keyboard. I've seen plenty of PC AT keyboards, but by the time those cam out, IBM had made them a lot lighter.

Here's the labels with the serial numbers and other stuff. The original PC came with a Cassette port, which you would use with a standard mono tape recorder. I've never seen anyone use those before. It was definitely the cheapest option when you bought them, but the floppy drive was pretty much the standard for most.

As we can see, it has only 5 slots for expansion cards. Believe it or not, you needed one just for floppy drives. Nothing but the keyboard connector and cassette deck were built into the motherboard on the original PC. So if you wanted floppy drives, a printer port, and video, you had 3 of your 5 slots taken up already. It's easy to see how the 8-slot PC/XT was quickly behind this, since adding a hard drive took up your 4th slot, and expanding your memory beyond 256K took up another. This is simply how it was in the good old days.

When I took off the cover, I was amazed at the complete lack of dust or any appearance of wear. The owner took really good care of this, and I didn't even see any smudges from fingerprints anywhere.

Here's the NEC 8088 chip. Not intel. This usually means that the owner upgraded to the NEC chip to get a boost in speed. Not much, though. No 8087 chip, but then, most people didn't buy those.

The floppy drive still had the cardboard insert, to protect the heads during shipping! The owner obviously took good care of it, even after he sold it. I personally thanked him for taking such good care of this thing, because it really is yet another PC I'll not have much work to do to get it restored.

Here's the manuals and discs I received with it. I opened the manual to read the dip switch settings. The previous owner said that the CGI graphics card is dead, and that the PC starts up with one long beep and 2 short beeps, which means that either the graphics card is shot, or the dip switches are set for monochrome. After a bit of troubleshooting, I concluded that the CGI card was toast.

The offending CGI Card. It's a full length card, as most were back then. I am replacing it temporarily, with a VGA card that I got on Ebay. The VGA Card I got was one of the few that used the 8-bit ISA bus of the PC. I have to use it because right now, the only monitors I have to do troubleshooting and setup with, are VGA Flat panels. I'm searching for a good deal on an old "Hercules" monochrome card and original IBM monitor. Though CGI would be the nicer option, the "good old days" were green and monochrome, and that's what this particular model was shipped with, originally, according to the owner.

So I finally got a VGA card to go into this, and it works! I was able to get a display on one of my many flat-panel monitors. Now I have a different problem -- A RAM error. Looks like I'll have to find some old chips to troubleshoot the RAM on this. I have no idea if they're even still available. I haven't used a chip puller or insertion tool in decades! I feel so old now.

So it looks like the PC will not be in working condition until I can get the parity error fixed. I realized, too that these didn't have a built-in setup! I have to load the setup program from the Diagnostics floppy disc. The Motherboard is a 64-256 type, and the previous owner said it's loaded with 256K. There are a couple of ways to troubleshoot it. I'll start by bringing it down to the onboard 16K, and setting the dipswitches on SW2 accordingly, then one bank at a time till I find the offending chip(s).